He studied chemical engineering at the Louis Pasteur University, in Strasbourg, and chemistry at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), graduating in 1994. In 1998, he obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Barcelona (UB), working on giant magnetoresistance in granular alloys. Then he spent more than three years in Berkeley (California) as a postdoc, first in the group of Krishnan Kannan at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and then in the group of Paul Alivisatos, at the College of Chemistry, University of California in Berkeley

In 2003, he obtained a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship and worked in the Physics Department at the UB. In 2005, he moved to the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (now ICN2) as ICREA Research Professor and created the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group. Since December 2014 he holds a double affiliation in ICN2 and Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR).